Already out there, for many many years. It is possible on many systems to cause physical damage by software.
See also various tests of SCADA attacks where it is possible to induce grave damage on generators and other plant equipment. See also Stuxnet, engineered to cause physical damage to a very specific equipment configuration in a stealth way.
I don’t see any need for anything else than common cost/benefit risk/reward economy.
Currently robots have no consciousness and respond pretty deterministically to inputs. So from any moral standpoint, damaging a robot can be no different to damaging any other device. They can’t be “tortured”. But if we ever create a conscious being, then it would be a different matter.
That said, the response of people to a robot being wilfully damaged is an interesting personality test. I showed the kids Boston Dynamics videos and they were initially creeped out, and then indignant that people would abuse the poor robots like that. So it’s rather unlikely we’ve been breeding little psychopaths …
Seems pretty obvious - empathy has nothing to do with souls. Empathy is a rather imprecise instinct that we apply to things that we perceive as being like us. Depending on how we grow up, it can be expansive, including all animals, or narrow, including only people of our immediate tribe of ethnically similar co-religionists.
We empathize with this thing for one reason, it’s movements are very human in appearance. That’s it. Empathy isn’t some great, sophisticated thing. It’s powerful, and critical to our society, but it isn’t a genius.
Yes, absolutely - it’s called Quality Assurance (QA) and I would expect it to have been done quite thoroughly to any piece of equipment capable of tearing my arms off.
This is like a question of “is it torture for my kid to run the electric window in my car up and down repeatedly?”
Yes, for me, and bad for the car, but (what’s the opposite of “OK”?) is it wrong? No. Not at all.
“Also, you don’t have a soul either, and if you disagree, then just show it to me.”
Like dark matter and dark energy, the soul can neither be seen, measured, nor observed. And yet, it must exist, because reality fails to make sense without it.
Dark matter is posited because objective measurements predict a certain amount of mass. Souls are posited because humans want to think they are exceptional and want to live forever. There is nothing about life, or human life, that requires a “soul,” so it is nothing like dark matter.
You could… But it wouldn’t make as much sense as replying “orange” to the same post.
Also, you didn’t answer the question. You started out with an assertion you haven’t backed up, and then when called on it, you changed the subject with a different question.
The ‘eFuse’ is probably worth a mention as well: it is a hardware component specifically designed to be damaged in software. Basically the same principle as an ordinary fuse; but integrated onto the IC die and fabricated by the same process as the rest of the logic. Depending on what the designer wishes, they can be used as write-once storage for things like serial numbers or systems that resist firmware downgrades; or they can cut power to entire sections of a chip if suitably placed.
That’s a part where failure is the feature; but it’s another irreversible change you can make from the software side.
You still have said nothing to back up the claim that souls exist, and that humans have them. Nor have you defined what you mean by the term soul. So while you may actually be in favor of something that may exist, you have failed to adequately explain what you even mean. So keep in mind, we’re arguing about something there’s literally no evidence for. You may be talking about something completely different.
while fish get knocked down several ranks in importance(enough that some ‘vegetarians’ will eat them) largely because they aren’t fuzzy
There is a very rational reason to eat fish and not mammals and it has nothing to do with fuzziness. It’s phylogenetic distance, which is the only objective measurement of difference. Everybody lives off the corpses of our fellow earthlings, the only difference is how long the time of divergence from us needs to be for the corpses to be acceptable as food. People who are cannibals have that distance as 0. Those who eat bush-meat primates but not humans have a slightly longer distance, those who eat mammals but not primates, longer still, those who eat fish but not mammals, yet longer still. I find it interesting that that there hasn’t been a bacteriovore movement, as such people could lord it over mere vegans because they don’t even eat fellow eukaryotes.